Tired of getting my butt kicked at Chicross races and in search of a victory, I drove up to Ann Arbor for a weekend of cat 2/3 races.

Saturday I felt flat. The pace off the start line felt slow, but I just couldn’t dig deep enough to find the motivation to move up. A mediocre start and someone crashing in front of me just as he makes a pass puts me mid-pack halfway through the first lap. The rest of the race I watch the 2 leaders work together fairly well to put time on the field every lap. I eventually work my way up to fifth, and then with 2 laps to go move into 3^rd and that’s where I finished.

I usually feel much better on the second day of back to back races. Now that I knew who the contenders were, I knew who to watch and where I wanted to be positioned. Unfortunately I’m not that smart of a racer once the race starts. After the start I am way back in 7^th or 8^th and I watch the guy I wanted to draft roll off the front and immediately get a 10 second gap. After the first lap I move from 8^th to second and try to chase down the leader. Unfortunately only one guy jumps on my wheel, and he made me pull in all the hard sections. So while the leader was not building a huge gap on us, we were not working too well together to cut into his lead. The guy I was riding with was the Wisconsin state criterium champion, so I knew if I didn’t drop him before the last lap he would use all his roadie tricks on me and out-sprint me for second place. With one lap to go I started to push hard in sections I didn’t push hard in before. The plan worked and he started to fade back. Then I noticed that a lead I thought was once insurmountable now seemed possible to overcome. The lead riders lead shrank from 300 meters to 60 meters on the last lap. Unfortunately, I ran out of real estate and had to settle for second. One more lap and I think I could have taken him.

Thanks to the wonders of chip timing I was able to see that I was able to catch him not because he faded, but because I really stepped it up in that last lap. My last lap was the fastest lap of all the racers laps in the race. This is a good sign my training is paying off and that I have the ability to be more aggressive than I am right now, especially at the start.

Photo by Zach Maino